CENSORSHIP AS FORMAL ENGINE
Eastern European cinema from the 1950s through the 1990s produced some of the most formally radical filmmaking in cinema history. The explanation for this is paradoxical: working under state censorship systems that prohibited direct political statement, filmmakers developed formal strategies of allegory, obliqueness, and aesthetic defamiliarisation that produced genuine formal innovation. The censorship was the constraint that generated the ingenuity.
POLISH CINEMA - THE SCHOOL AND THE MASTER
The Polish Film School emerged in the late 1950s around directors who had survived or been formed by WWII and the subsequent Communist consolidation. Andrzej Wajda is the central figure: the War Trilogy - A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - establishes the formal vocabulary that Polish cinema builds from. The films are about the Polish wartime resistance, made in a Communist state that had its own ideological version of what that resistance meant; Wajda's formal ambiguity allows the films to be read simultaneously as conforming to and subverting the official version.
Roman Polański's early Polish films - Knife in the Water (1962), the short films from Łódź film school - are the most formally radical products of the Polish Film School environment. Polański left Poland for the West before the full implications of the political constraints became professionally confining.
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–1996): The Dekalog (1988, ten one-hour films made for Polish television), The Double Life of Véronique (1991), and the Three Colours trilogy (Blue, White, Red, 1993–1994) are the most internationally visible Polish films and the ones most completely demonstrating what Polish formal cinema can do. The Three Colours trilogy is the correct entry point: three formally distinct films on the themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity, each using colour and narrative in ways that are formally sophisticated and emotionally direct simultaneously.
THE CZECH NEW WAVE
The Czech New Wave of the 1960s - produced in the specific cultural liberalisation of the Prague Spring before the 1968 Soviet invasion ended it - is one of the great concentrated periods in cinema history. Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec working simultaneously in a period of perhaps five years produced an extraordinary body of formally radical work.
Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966) is the formal landmark: two young women systematically destroying everything they encounter, shot in a deliberately discontinuous style with colour experiments and editing that refuses the conventions of both Western and socialist realist cinema. Banned almost immediately. The most formally radical film of the Czech New Wave and one of the most formally radical films in the European tradition.
Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966, Academy Award): The most accessible Czech New Wave film, and the one most frequently cited as an entry point. A young railway worker in Nazi-occupied Bohemia. The ironic tone, the black comedy running through the wartime setting, the specific formal lightness with which it treats its serious subject - this is the Czech New Wave at its most disarmingly approachable.
HUNGARIAN CINEMA AND BÉLA TARR
Hungarian cinema produced the formal extreme of the Eastern European tradition in Béla Tarr (b. 1955). Sátántangó (1994, seven hours) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, 145 minutes) are the most formally demanding films in the tradition and the ones most directly about entropy - the slow collapse of social order - as both content and form. The long takes, the rain, the mud, the figures moving through a world that is dissolving: the form enacts the argument.
István Szabó (Mephisto, 1981; Colonel Redl, 1985) is the more accessible entry point to Hungarian cinema - the formal intelligence of the tradition with more narrative accessibility than Tarr provides.
THE ROMANIAN NEW WAVE
The Romanian New Wave that emerged in the mid-2000s is the most significant recent development in Eastern European cinema: Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Călin Peter Netzer - a generation making formally minimal, psychologically intense films about Romanian life under and after communism.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007, Palme d'Or) is the correct entry point: a film about obtaining an illegal abortion in Ceaușescu's Romania, shot with a formal austerity that refuses to editorialize while making its political argument with complete formal precision. The Cannes jury was right. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Puiu, 2005) - a sick man moving through Romania's healthcare system over one night - is the companion piece.
The long takes, the rain, the mud, the figures moving through a world that is dissolving: the form enacts the argument.